Police Told a Woman to Report Her Rape, Then Arrested Her

"People say rape is serious and you should report it, but look what happened to me: I reported my rape, and they told me it never happened."

That's the tragic reality of 23-year-old Lara McLeod, who reluctantly reported her rape at 19 and then was arrested for filing a false rape accusation after officers coaxed her into making a report. It's a mindfuck of a story, skillfully reported by BuzzFeed's Katie J.M. Baker, that shows how horrifically bad things can get when police betray a bias against rape victims.

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Lara tells Baker she was raped by her sister's fiancé, Joaquin Rams, two weeks after her sister, Hera, and Rams had welcomed a new baby. Lara told her parents, who then told Hera. Hera believed her sister. She called the police to have an escort to ensure safety as she gathered her things from her and Rams's home. That escort visit opened an investigation, police said in court documents, and an officer called Lara to ask her if the allegations were true. She said they were. They asked her to come in and file a report. Though hesitant, she agreed. But according to Baker's report, the officer conducting the investigation, Det. Brian Cavender, did not appear to believe Lara:

Cavender appeared skeptical of Lara's claims from the start. He repeatedly questioned her as to why she didn't try to escape, even though Lara told him she was afraid of Joaquin's gun, and that he warned her she would "fuck my family life up" if she didn't comply. Cavender asked Lara why she didn't keep her arms down when he tried to take her shirt off, even though she told him over and over again that she didn't struggle because she was "terrified." Lara used the word "catatonic" to describe her mental state by the time she yielded to Joaquin after hours of arguing. "Despite being in a catatonic state she remembered that he led her by the arm into the house through the garage entrance," Cavender noted.

Police sent her to get a rape kit and then met with Joaquin and his lawyer.

Joaquin initially told police he "did not touch" Lara, he later admitted in court. Now, he'd changed his story. They had sex, but it was consensual, he said. (Later, in court, he would also say it wasn't the first time.) And he had proof, he told the police and later said in court: a video he had secretly recorded using a camcorder Hera had left their house with a few hours before.

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Baker points out that it is a crime to film someone naked in Virginia without their consent, where Hera and Rams lived, but this did not raise any red flags for the Prince William County Police. At this point, Cavender was focused on Lara's so-called false accusation. The police collected Hera's camera, but they were unable to find anything there so they actually handed the camera over to Rams, the alleged rapist, to take to his lawyer. Magically, the video of the assault appeared. Baker reports that "Cavender then examined the video evidence and concluded that the sex must have been consensual because McLeod did "'not appear to be struggling' in the video Joaquin had provided, and 'at no point during the sexual intercourse did Lara ever tell him to 'stop.'"

What happens next is appalling:

After a cursory investigation of the claim they compelled her to file, the police abruptly concluded Lara was lying about being raped and arrested her. Hera was charged with obstructing justice for aiding Lara's alleged deceit, and had to spend her savings on legal fees to get them dismissed. Lara's charges were eventually expunged, but not before her reputation was destroyed. She says she still has severe panic attacks whenever she sees a police officer.

But the worst was yet to come.

In the ensuing battle for custody over Prince, Hera and Joaquin's infant son, it emerged that not only had Joaquin lied about his name, employment history, and age — he was a decade older than he had claimed — but he had also once been a suspect in his ex-girlfriend's shooting death and a person of interest in his mother's death, too, although he was never successfully charged in either case. He had been accused of child abuse by his other son, although never convicted, and ran an amateur porn site.

But thanks to the charges against Hera and Lara, Joaquin was able to portray himself as a comparatively fit parent — and the victim of a smear job. The judge granted Joaquin unsupervised visits. Three months later, EMTs found Prince unconscious on the floor of Joaquin's house. The 15-month-old died the next day. Months later, Joaquin was charged with capital murder.

Rape and sexual assault are underreported crimes, as many victims are afraid of coming forward to police over fear of not being believed. The case, in which the police seem to have been biased against Lara from the start, demonstrates that fear is not unfounded and highlights a major problem with law enforcement and sexual assault, according to one law professor who spoke to BuzzFeed:

"One of the biggest problems in rape investigations is that police think women lie," said Lisa Avalos, a University of Arkansas law professor who researches the prosecution of false rape claims. "When police think that, they typically fail to thoroughly investigate their rape complaints, thus doing a disservice to those victims as well as to the community as a whole, because a predator remains at large."

Police in neighboring Washington, D.C., for example, are currently seeking to reform their approach to sexual assault cases, after it was reported that an 11-year-old girl was charged with making a false rape allegation after she reported two brutal gang-rapes in 2008.

The Prince William County officers involved in the investigation did not respond to BuzzFeed's requests for comment.